Amazon Affiliate Program – Make Money Online Through Shopping

As a blogger, you are constantly looking for ways to diversify your cash generating income streams. With all of the affiliate programs out there screaming for your business as they continue to increase their portfolios and profits, which ones are you going to run and why? I am about to show you why you need to start making money online with the Amazon Associates affiliate program.

Side note: I can’t believe I just used “Make Money Online” in my blog post title. How many times do I have to say “Make Money Online” in the article to be a true wannabe affiliate marketer? There’s two in just this side note! Make Money Online…make that 3 times! Sorry…where’s my coffee again?

Amazon Associates Affiliate Program

The Amazon Associates affiliate program is attached to the largest online shopping portal, Amazon.com. With commissions ranging from 4 to over 8+ percent per sale (depending on number of items shipped), the Amazon affiliate program runs in the same commission scale as most online retailers, so why should you run Amazon over other affiliate offers? I am going to illustrate why you should at least test (the key to all affiliate promotions/advertising) the Amazon Affiliate Program and see if it will work with the audience on your blog, learning how to sell on amazon is not that hard.

Amazon.com is arguably the largest shopping portal on the net. If you can not find a product that is related to your niche on Amazon, you probably need to rethink your strategy as you are blogging to a small audience. Once you create your Amazon affiliate account and start linking on your site to relevant products to your niche through reviews or in article links, your readers click on the link and are taken to Amazon.com. You then get a 24 hour cookie period, which is unfortunately shorter than most, for that consumer to purchase ANYTHING on Amazon.com and you receive a 4 – 8+ percent commission off that sale!

Why is this a good deal for the blogger looking to make some money?

I know…the commission rate seems low, the cookie duration is drastically shorter than other online retailers (average is around 30 days), so why is the Amazon Affiliate Program a must do for a lot of bloggers? The Amazon program is a good fit for a lot of bloggers simply because Amazon is the largest shopping portal on the net. If you look at the commission diagram below, you will notice items that have absolutely nothing to do with cycling, mountain biking or even the word bike! These commissions came off of a click from my cycling blog, Mountain Biking by 198, and I received a commission off the sale.

I don’t know about you, but I will take commissions off of Brita replacement filters and the lego version of Indiana Jones all day long. While $1.83 and $1.20 sound like a very small amount of money, you have to realize the long term affects as these small amounts add up exponentially over time. Yes, we would all like to get $30.00 commissions with every sale (or even the $6.60 commission you get for every sale you refer to this site for Ramped Reviews), but the idea is to diversify your income streams and what easier way to do that than inserting relevant affiliate links to Amazon.com? To make things really easy on yourself as the blogger, you can purchase the MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plugin and have it search out the keyword phrases on your blog for you.

As we continually look for ways to increase our bottom line and make more money from our blogs online, we need to test out different avenues of revenue to realize the dream of the dot com lifestyle. Testing out affiliate programs like this one from Amazon and seeing if it works with your audience on your blog is the only way you are going to realize the dreams you have set out for yourself.

Check it out…try it out…and see if it works for you…